A packed program of activities in Washington and New York included one-on-one meetings, sector-specific lunches and a business seminar. 

The first Chile Week event in the United States had positive results. The initiative, designed to promote Chilean products and the investment opportunities the country offers US businesspeople, culminated in New York after a week of activities in Miami and Washington.

Following trade and investment promotion activities in Miami, Chile Week went on to Washington where a program of meetings took place, led by Economy Minister Luis Felipe Céspedes and the Director of InvestChile, Carlos Álvarez. Targeting particularly technology development and service companies, the authorities had a meeting in the residence of Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdés with members of the local Information Technology Industry Council which includes some of the world’s most important companies in this sector such as Microsoft, HP, Amazon, Google and Apple.

Carlos Álvarez told the press that “in Washington, we met with an important number of companies, some of which already have investments in Chile while others have told us they are considering the expansion of their operations in the country and some have yet to establish a presence there. What we are doing is to invite them to visit Chile and seriously evaluate the possibility of establishing operations there.”

Activities in Washington also included meetings with top authorities at the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank.

PROMOTION SEMINARS

In New York, events included an investment promotion seminar, attended by over 70 people and chaired by Minister Céspedes who was accompanied by Ambassador Valdés, Carlos Álvarez, the Director General of DIRECON, Paulina Nazal, and Om Arora, Innovative Health Regional Head at Pfizer, who spoke about this company’s experience as an investor in Chile.

At the seminar, Minister Céspedes told the audience that “foreign investment is crucial for the development of our economy”, adding that Chile “has clear comparative advantages for attracting investment in specific sectors”. He also underscored the government’s commitment to the establishment of long-term policies that are conducive to a stable and reliable investment climate, emphasizing the opportunity that Chile represents for US investors as a platform for the rest of the region and Asia.

During the seminar, Carlos Álvarez talked about the new investment opportunities the country offers, drawing particular attention to the mining services, technology and equipment sector, solar energy, the sophisticated food industry, sustainable tourism and infrastructure. “Our country needs foreign investment that helps us increase the sophistication of our exports and that goes to sectors where we have proven comparative advantages but also gaps and in which investment can be key for our development,” he said.

Álvarez also noted that the United States is Chile’s leading source of foreign direct investment, accounting for an inflow of more than US$20,500 million between 2009 and 2014 or over 20% of the total amount entering the country during that period.

Other activities in New York included roundtables on energy and tourism led by Minister Céspedes and Ambassador Valdés; exportable services led by Carlos Álvarez and Paulina Nazal; and the food industry, with the Ministry of Agriculture’s Rodrigo Contreras, InvestChile’s Vanessa Severin and Mauricio Banchieri, the ProChile export promotion agency’s commercial attaché in New York. These roundtables alone reached an audience of some 40 local companies from across different sectors.

In addition to bilateral meetings with companies from the energy and services sectors, the activities culminated on Friday with a breakfast organized by the Council of the Americas in its offices.